With 2020 over and the new year in, promising news has come about that will affect Americans as a whole. The first vaccination for Covid-19 was administered Dec. 14, 2020. According to Wall Street Journal, 55 sites received the vaccine and throughout the week 2.9 million more doses have been given out to 581 other locations throughout the U.S. As of right now health care workers and government officials are being prioritized for the vaccine. While it will be a little bit until vaccines are readily available for all the public to receive, a question that needs to be asked, how will receiving (or not) the vaccine affect Americans in our daily lives.

Doctors have been working around the clock since the pandemic hit to come up with a solution or vaccine for covid-19. It has been a little less than a year now since covid-19 started hitting Americans on a national level. The fact that a vaccine has been produced and is now being administered is very concerning to many Americans considering the timeline that has preceded. One can look to America’s past to see where concern may or may not be warranted. For example, polio, a serious virus that disabled over 35,000 people a year according to the CDC (Center for Disease Control) had a very slow process in having a vaccine developed. Dr. Jonas Salk took from the early 1930’s to 1953 to develop an effective vaccine. Now understandably, the medical world has made much progress in many treatments and operations, but it is still worrisome on the timeline of this vaccine especially when many Americans are ready to be done and go back to normal life.

Another thing that is left up to question is how choosing not to take the vaccine may affect some Americans. To do certain major things like go to school, travel, or even work certain vaccinations are required to be had in order to participate. What could end up happening is that this vaccine could be next on the list of vaccines needed to participate in certain portions of life. This could have many people who are not confident in the vaccine worried as they may be left no choice but to take a possibly underdeveloped vaccine. The future is still up in the air on what could happen regarding the vaccine but Americans will have to take it one step at a time just how we have throughout the rest of this pandemic.